Radio Silence. Alice Oseman

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       FUTURES

      “Can you hear that?” said Carys Last, halting in front of me so suddenly that I almost crashed into her. We both stood on the train platform. We were fifteen and we were friends.

      “What?” I said, because I couldn’t hear anything except the music I was listening to through one earphone. I think it might have been Animal Collective.

      Carys laughed, which didn’t happen very often. “You’re playing your music too loud,” she said, hooking a finger around the earphone’s wire and pulling it away from me. “Listen.”

      We stood still and listened and I remember every single thing I heard in that moment. I heard the rumbling of the train we’d just got off leaving the station, heading farther into town. I heard the ticket gate guard explaining to an old man that the high-speed train to St Pancras was cancelled today due to the snow. I heard the distant screech of traffic, the wind above our heads, the flush of the station toilet and “The train now arriving at – Platform One – is the – 8.02 – to – Ramsgate,” snow being shovelled and a fire engine and Carys’s voice and …

      Burning.

      We turned round and stared at the town beyond, snowy and dead. We could normally see our school from here, but today there was a cloud of smoke in the way.

      “How did we not see the smoke while we were on the train?” Carys asked.

      “I was asleep,” I said.

      “I wasn’t.”

      “You weren’t paying attention.”

      “Well, I guess the school burned down,” she said, and walked away to sit on the station bench. “Seven-year-old Carys’s wish came true.”

      I stared for a moment more, and then went to join her.

      “D’you think it was those pranksters?” I said, referring to the anonymous bloggers who had been pranking our school for the past month with increasing ferocity.

      Carys shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? The end result is the same.”

      “It does matter.” It was at that moment that it all started to sink in. “It’s— it looks really serious. We’re going to have to change schools. It looks like the whole of C block and D block are … just … gone.” I crumpled my skirt in my hands. “My locker was in D block. My GCSE sketchbook was in there. I spent days on some of that stuff.”

      “Oh, shit.”

      I shivered. “Why would they do this? They’ve destroyed so much hard work. They’ve messed up so many people’s GCSEs and A levels, things that seriously affect people’s futures. They’ve literally ruined people’s lives.”

      Carys seemed to think about it, and then opened her mouth to reply, but ended up closing it again, and not saying anything.